CP-Net: Multi-Scale Core Point Localization in Fingerprints Using Hourglass Network

Core point is a location that exhibits high curvature properties in a fingerprint. Detecting the accurate location of a core point is useful for efficient fingerprint matching, classification, and identification tasks. This paper proposes CP-Net, a novel core point detection network that comprises the Macro Localization Network (MLN) and the Micro-Regression Network (MRN). MLN is a specialized autoencoder network with an hourglass network at its bottleneck. It takes an input fingerprint image and outputs a region of interest that could be the most probable region containing the core point. The second component, MRN, regresses the RoI and locates the coordinates of the core point in the given fingerprint sample. Introducing an hourglass network in the MLN bottleneck ensures multi-scale spatial attention that captures local and global contexts and facilitates a higher localization accuracy for that area. Unlike existing multi-stage models, the components are stacked and trained in an end-to-end manner. Experiments have been performed on three widely used publicly available fingerprint datasets, namely, FVC2002 DB1A, FVC2004 DB1A, and FVC2006 DB2A. The proposed model achieved a true detection rate (TDR) of 98%, 100%, and 99.04% respectively, while considering 20 pixels distance from the ground truth as correct. Obtained experimental results on the considered datasets demonstrate that CP-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art core point detection techniques.